How to make Silhouette Invitations

Do you remember the old silhouette pictures that you used to make of
yourself when you were a kid at school. You would stand up against the
side of a wall with a large piece of paper temporarily stuck to it and
then turn on the overhead projector to shine the light on you. While
you stand there someone would trace around your shadow on the paper
and create a silhouette of your head.

We're going to take that concept and use it to create unique party
invitations. fortunately we don't have to find an ohp to help us with
the task. All we need is a digital camera and some reliable software
like Adobe photoshop or gimp.

Silhouette
invitation

I made these invites so that I would have something nice to remember
my daughters 1st birthday. I wanted to use the set of skills I have to
do something for her.

Supplies

Digital photo of daughter side on

Computer and Adobe Photoshop software

Brown cardstock

Oval shape cutter - Making memories scrapbooking stuff

Lace stickers

Adhesive

Silhouette design

The printed piece on the inside of the card was designed using Adobe
Photoshop CS4 and various fonts, brushes and graphics.

The silhouette in the picture frame on the invitation was made from a
photograph that was taken about 2 weeks before her birthday party.

I traced it out in Photoshop using the pen tool. You can easily
acheive the same result by printing the picture out and used a pen and
some tracing paper.

Printed as photographs

The final design was printed at our local Costco as a 4x6 photo
print. That was done to keep the cost down as printing photographs
is very cheap.

Assembling the card

The folded card was from a set of
pre-made 5x7 cards that I found at a local hobby store. Die cutting
the oval window in the front was really easy with the help of the oval
cutter that Creative Memories makes for scrapbooking. I borrowed that
from my wife's scrapbooking materials.

I simply took the printed photograph and adhered it to the inside of
the card.

The small sticker in the bottom
corner that looks like lace was also another Creative Memories item.
It was some sort of lazer cut border/sticker.

The invites took me about a day to complete since I wasn't sure how I
wanted the layout to look. The cost of the complete invite averaged
out to be about 50¢ per piece.